C3.ai, Inc.

C3.ai is an enterprise AI software company. It provides a platform and pre-built AI applications for organizations that want to apply artificial intelligence to critical business operations without building custom infrastructure. Tom Siebel, who previously founded Siebel Systems (the CRM company Oracle acquired), started C3.ai in 2009 in Redwood City, California. The focus is large enterprises and government organizations.

The C3 AI Platform handles the full AI application lifecycle. Data ingestion and unification from multiple sources, model development and training, MLOps, feature engineering, and production deployment. It's designed to compress AI development timelines from months to weeks. Building AI at enterprise scale is hard. The platform aims to make it more accessible for organizations that don't have deep AI engineering teams.

C3.ai also offers a library of turnkey AI applications for use cases like predictive maintenance, supply chain optimization, fraud detection, energy management, anti-money laundering, and inventory optimization. C3 Generative AI, launched in 2023, brings large language model capabilities to enterprise search, document understanding, and conversational analytics.

Customers span defense, intelligence, manufacturing, energy, financial services, and healthcare. The US Department of Defense, Baker Hughes, Shell, and Koch Industries are among the deployments. Annual revenue is roughly $350 million. The company shifted from subscriptions to consumption-based pricing. Gross margins are about 60%. Around 900 employees work at C3.ai. Competitors include Palantir, Databricks, Google Vertex AI, and AWS SageMaker.